The filmmaker Cameron Crowe had the coolest childhood. Growing up in California, he started writing for Rolling Stone magazine at the age of 15. His big break came in 1973, when he had the chance to interview the Allman Brothers Band, then one of America’s biggest rock groups, for a cover piece.

For days he tagged along with the rockers on tour, winning their trust with his passion for music and open, honest, moon-shaped face, while phoning his mother every evening to assure her that he wasn’t taking drugs. Finally he earned an interview with the troubled Greg Allman himself, who, shirtless on a bed, spoke about the loss of his big brother Duane in a motorcycle accident and strummed some songs on his guitar.

The article seemed in the can, but then disaster struck. Off his head on drugs, Allman called Crowe to his room at 2 a.m. and demanded to see his ID. Horrified to learn he was 16, he accused him of working for the FBI. Even the teenager’s patient refusal of drugs and booze now seemed to count against him. Allman then confiscated Crowe’s sack of interview tapes. The interview was dead in the water. The kid had blown it.

‘You made friends. That was your mistake,’ his mentor, the rock critic Lester Bangs, told him. ‘They make you feel cool, and I met you. You are not cool.’ He pronounced the word mockingly – kewl – as if it might not be the be-all and end-all. ‘We’re from fucking San Diego,’ he concluded. ‘We’re uncool!’ In that moment he freed Crowe from the tyranny of trying to be what he was not, as well as gifting him the title of this charming, nostalgic, gently revealing memoir.

It’s an early life memoir, incidentally. That means there’s lots about Crowe’s family – especially his brilliant, impossible schoolteacher mother – and his work as a rock journalist, but not much about his second career as a maker of classic movies such as Say Anything and Jerry Maguire or, more recently, misfires such as Elizabeth Town. On the other hand, the defining themes of his life in journalism became the defining themes of his films: the price of honesty and whether it’s possible to be successful and a nice guy.

The first of these is written into the title of Say Anything – an offbeat romcom in which a girl believes she can say anything to her father, until one day she does – and the opening of Jerry Maguire, in which a sports agent writes a memo telling it like it is about the corruption of his profession and promptly gets the sack. The second of these themes is comprehensively addressed by this book, and answered.

For some, Crowe’s niceness is his flaw as a film-maker. That was how Rolling Stone’s editor Jann Wenner felt about his journalism. After Crowe pulled off the coup of landing a cover interview with Led Zeppelin, which shifted a ton of copies, Wenner rebuked him on the grounds that the piece ‘could have been dictated by the band’. Devastatingly, he then asked: ‘What would a real writer have written?’ On the other hand, Crowe’s disarming decency is arguably what persuaded the wary Zep guitarist Jimmy Page to do the interview in the first place. And this is a consideration too often overlooked by critics. When you watch a film or read a book, you are spending time with its creator. Are they, in the end, a good egg? That’s what draws people back to Crowe’s best films and what makes The Uncool such an enjoyable read.

That, and the fact that Crowe has a writing style that matches his personality: laid-back and inviting, with flashes of wit, as when he describes Bangs as ‘always slinging opinions like a dart player who didn’t care if the darts ever hit the dartboard’, or when he recalls that his mother, when driving, ‘hugged the steering wheel and seemed to be surveying all of the other cars as if looking for a sniper’. It was his mother, too, who accurately remarked that his decency was his unique selling point as an artist. ‘Stay focused on the light,’ she told him. ‘That’s what people love about your work.’

And for all his faults – take it from me, Elizabeth Town is a slog – Crowe’s USP has served him well. To return to the debacle of his Allman Brothers Band interview, even that turned out okay. A couple of weeks afterwards, Crowe had a call from the group’s manager. Apparently Greg ‘had discovered a sack of tapes and had no idea how he got them’. They were returned to Crowe, and his cover piece ran after all. Not only that, but the experience formed the core episode of Almost Famous, the autobiographical film about Crowe’s life as a teenage music critic for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Not bad for an uncool kid.